So as I understand it, Google’s using it’s monopoly market position to force web “standards” unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors.
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m a fledgling tech guy, but this sounds like abuse of a monopoly. Google which serves 75% of the world’s ads and has 75% of the browser market share seems to want to use its market power to annihilate people’s privacy and control over their web experience.
So we can file a complaint with FTC led by Lina Khan who has been the biggest warrior against abuse by big tech in the US.
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation
We can also file a complaint with the DOJ:
https://www.justice.gov/atr/citizen-complaint-center
And there have to be EU, UK, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese organizations that we can file antitrust complaints to.
While that probably is “legally” what should happen:
I hate to say it, but google is very much “too big to fail” at this point. People lost their minds over how many helpful posts were hidden during the reddit protests. Imagine how they’ll feel when pretty much 99% of the videos on the internet go away (I pulled that number out of my ass but… it is probably not that far off).
While Google failing would definitely cause a disruption, I don’t think they are too big to fail. I’ve done some experimenting with other search engines and Kagi & Duckduckgo are both sufficient.
Gmail is very popular, but everyone could find another email provider. Losing YouTube would hurt but we have other large sites with infrastructure that could cover. Facebook, Twitter, reddit, Instagram, tiktok, etc. Together I think they could take on the bandwidth
As for the browser, I’d be glad if Chrome died. We need more browsers. Chrome dying would force all of the derivatives to do something else. Vivaldi, edge, brave, etc would all need to either switch to Firefox or a project for a new browser would begin
I think while disruptive Google failing would ultimately be good. We have anti-trust laws for a reason and we need to actually use them. If we don’t enforce them, why did we pass the laws in the first place? The market stagnated and the consumers lose. Plus we fall behind pragmatic countries like China who are blazing forward full speed. Their government is more than willing to turn the $$$ hose to innovate in technology. Here in the US we rely on the market. But if we hamstring the market with a monopoly… just a recipe for disaster in my opinion
Losing gmail (which I didn’t even think of…) would be MASSIVELY disruptive. People would literally lose touch with family and friends, companies would go under, etc.
And no, social media sites can’t handle what youtube does. Even ignoring how laughable twitter currently is: at its prime, it STILL couldn’t serve videos reliably. Tiktok and Instagram have very strict limits on video uploads and the rest largely rely on youtube anyway. Yes, some people upload videos to facebook or choose to mirror them, but it is often still youtube links. Same with reddit.
That also ignores the creator side of things. To my understanding, instagram is mostly about getting enough views to get sponsors. Tiktok? I have no freaking idea how you monetize that. Facebook briefly had the idea of paying content creators but, to my understanding, has worse ad revenue than twitch. Youtube is pretty unique in that, because it is Google, they can give significant amounts of ad revenue to creators who can more or less make their entire life releasing a few videos a month. MAYBE twitch could de-shit a bit (because losing your competition is when you give more money to creators?) but they aren’t a VOD site. So even if these social media sites could “handle the load”, they wouldn’t provide the environment that generates that kind of load.
Antitrust laws should have prevented us from getting this far in the first place. But taking out google will have massive repercussions that go beyond “it would be great if we ate the rich” levels of thought.
There are many other email providers besides gmail out there…
Yeah, and none of them let you keep your existing @gmail.com address. Which means you’ll have to update it everywhere. That’s the massive problem.
That’s just a bit of work. Keeping an evil monopoly because of inconvenience that isn’t really a great argument in by book
You’re right, but the argument was that it wouldn’t be that disruptive, and that’s not true.
I am old enough to remember the times the same thing was said about Hotmail and other sites… people will adapt.
Not one alone. But work will probably be split between more sites. And actual limitation are just decision that were made and can change.
Anyone who hasn’t planed for this with an account on another service, at the very least like proton, kinda deserves whats coming due to the signs.
I’m no soothsayer and even I can see that Google is making enemies with governments, China, US, and Europe. You can survive one or two but not all three.
The world is much larger than just the wealthy nations. Where I’m from, the internet is synonymous with Google, emails with gmail and online video sharing with YouTube.
Digital literacy is hard to worry about when you are struggling to improve your life. Even outside of harsh situations it’s not okay to expect everyone to literate themselves.
People like that need to be educated more than any other and liberating them of that responsibility only harms them, it does not help them.
Nobody is claiming it wouldn’t be disruptive, but the question is if the long term it would be better for society. Monopolies are not good and the longer we allow them to survive, the more ingrained they become.
Free market capitalism only works well when there is competition. When big companies are so powerful they can just buy up any potential competitors, we’re not in free market capitalism anymore. We’re entering a merger of corporate and state power - teetering slowly towards a “tolerant” fascism. It’s something that desperately needs to be addressed.
Digital illiteracy is easy to combat. You just put the person on a different service. As long as it “just works” they’ll be fine.
Firefox is currently kept alive by Google, which pays $500M/year to Mozilla in order to have Google Search as the default in Firefox and to not let Google Chrome become a monopoly on paper too. Break Google and it would probably die.
Creating “more browsers” (browser engines I would add, we already have enough browsers) is not an easy task. The specification that needs to be implemented is massive, and doing so efficiently is even more complex. It would be a waste of resources to have many browser engines, not to mention the confusion in the webdev community when you suddently have to work around many more bugs in the implementations.
Web browsers are a critical infrastructure. Linux too, is very complex and requires lots of development and standards. But we have companies that spend the resources because it’s necessary for their bottom line. Servers all run on Linux.
Similar thing I think would happen with web browsers. Many companies would have incentive to develop web browsers - Facebook for example would want people on their site and that requires a web browser.
My question is if this would simply result in another company taking Google spot in the market or there would be a new open source collaborative effort by many companies like Linux? I’m not really sure. Like you said, the specifications are massive and basically shape and mold the internet as a whole. So it’s not a simple task.
Also just because Google funds Mozilla through search does not mean Firefox would immediately die should Google go under. Consider that Firefox would be only 1 of 2 browsers left alive. They could presumably make a deal with Bing or Duckduckgo or something and would be able to make up the lost income in spades because of sheer volume of users.
There was a time Firefox was actually the most popular browser.
It seems to me that they sponsor Mozilla Foundation just to thwart accusations of monopoly and make it look like they got competition.
I agree with you, but it’s still a fact that that sponsorship make up most of Mozilla’s income. And if Google gets broken up then will they still care about that?
If I’m not mistaken Youtube creators get something like 1/10 of a penny per view of a video. Is that really favorable for creators?
I don’t know any of the youtubers that were cited in this, but this lines up with what other youtubers have said on podcasts and the like
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-do-youtubers-make
1.61 to 29.30 USD per 1000 views. That is going to vary based on how many ads they run but that does indeed come out to ~0.002 USD per ad play.
Which… is still really good compared to stuff like twitch. And that doesn’t include the youtube premium numbers which are a LOT more privately held but are universally acknowledged as a lot better… even by twitch streamers.
The twitch math gets harder due to a mix of twitch being a lot stricter about streamers sharing their revenue and it changing every five minutes. But going by the current 50/50 split on subscriptions: If you have 1000 subscribers in a given month (which is already amazing since having a couple hundred concurrents put you in the top 1% of streamers) AND it averages out to all at the 5 dollar tier (they aren’t, most are going to be using bezos bucks), you are getting 2500 USD. Per month. Considering that most streamers at this range are looking at 3-5 8 hour days per week (and many go MUCH farther), and let’s say 4 weeks per month:
2500 bucks/ (4 days per week * 8 hours per day * 4 weeks) = 19.5 bucks an hour.
Which… is still a lot better than minimum wage but that speaks to the US being a complete shitshow.
But let’s just do rough numbers on some youtubers. I watched a HowNOT2 on big walling last night. 74k views for a one hour video that was uploaded eight months ago. I have youtube premium so I have no idea how many ads that video had, but a quick google suggests people do 4 ads for a 12 minute video. Ryan is actively pushing away from ad based monetization, so let’s say that was 4 ads for a one hour video.
4 ads per video * 74 thousand views * 2 bucks per 1000 views = 592 dollars for a video.
Which is shit… except he has 457 videos uploaded. And they all (okay, a lot probably got demonetized, but roll with me) generate revenue. That adds up and is why people like NileRed can talk about NOT making videos for a year because people will keep watching his older ones and keep him going while he figures out what kind of experiments are worth filming.
Whereas, if you take a week off Twitch you take a week off getting paid (sort of. subscription models get weird).
Well, NireRed also has NileBlue and a bunch of patreon supporters (over 2k, apparently getting 250k/creation, which is insane). He’s not living off NileRed videos alone
That’s the point though. With the current state of youtube, you can diversify and benefit from your back catalog.
I didn’t watch the AOC stream the other night, but if that was on Hasan’s channel instead of hers: That is a nice sack of cash for Hasan (that he hopefully split with Poki and Rae et al). That means jack shit next month where he is back to Reacting to every youtuber’s content under the sun while he takes a piss break and gets confused over the parts he fast forwarded through. And it is a new hustle the month after that.
Sponsorships and patreons help a lot with that. But it doesn’t replace the benefits of just a ridiculously generous royalty model for VODs (pretty sure SAG would stop striking immediately if they could get even that out of “hollywood”). I forget who it was (it almost has to be William Osman?) but someone even talked about how they make a nice chunk of change every time OfflineTV uploads a video because they did a bunch of collabs with Michael Reeves back in the day and people seek out videos with him in it. And a lot of those videos are three or even five years old at this point. Whereas, unless you are in the AOC stream, you aren’t (directly) profiting from one of the biggest internet events of the year.
Which is why I specifically used HowNot2 as my example. Because I would be shocked if there are only 4 ads in that one hour video. And he is not a big channel (161k subscribers, so Silver play button that he has to pay for?). And I similarly used a very high end twitch channel because… even getting a hundred concurrents is a huge deal and the vast majority of them won’t be subscribed. So 1000 subscribers at pay tiers is very much a big deal.
Whereas, making the jump to full time youtuber is a lot more viable. Yes, you still have to play the sponsorship game and talk about raid shadow legends a bunch, but the actual subscriber counts to “make it viable” are shockingly low. I am too lazy to look it up, but Mortismal recently did a celebration stream and the number he cited as good enough for him was shockingly low.
And to bring it all back around: you know how youtube is able to run at a loss AND still pay creators enough to generate content? By stealing and monetizing all of our personal information from every single time you search for why it burns when you pee.
Chrome became popular for 2 reasons:
Number 1 isn’t always true anymore but has momentum while 2 is fixed. Until something changes, Chrome is cemented into web browsing.
Would that really be that bad? Another browser will take its place, or Chromium will be forked. The worst thing would be YouTube going down, but even that is not that bad. Even so, I don’t think YouTube would necessarily disappear; it would probably be bought by some other company for pennies on the dollar. If that happened, I think it would be a mild inconvenience but nothing too crazy. In all, I say break it up!
Microsoft might take over Chromium.
Nobody’s taking over YouTube, at least not for long (or without massive changes).
Hold up… You’re not actually saying that Chrome and Chromium will die out within a decade, and not only that, but YouTube only has a year or less left? I do not believe that at all lol
If google maintains its current dominance of search and The Internet in general? I could still see youtube as we know it dying out within the decade, but I think it is “fine”. Chrome/Chromium I see more like Internet Explorer in that it will continue to exist until something new comes out.
But that all assumes that google has near infinite money from ads, analytics, etc. The moment you get rid of that? you now have massive data storage and data availability costs that do not in the slightest bit pay for themselves. MAYBE if every content creator gets told to pound sand they could break even but… then content creators aren’t making new videos and youtube rapidly becomes an archive site and fewer people check in there very single day and ad revenue go down and…
Again, there is a reason that the only companies that have even a snowball’s chance of running massive video sites are the ones who also run massive cloud compute/storage services AND have “side hustles” that make up half the god damned internet. And Microsoft still failed horribly. And twitch/youtube are constantly trying to find ways to actually become semi-profitable without completely losing the userbase.
But all of this “We should break them up” is basically guaranteeing that these services and tools go away pretty fast. Because then they are just money sinks for companies that actually need to profit off said sink.
Obviously pure speculation, but I see google eventually making it much harder to watch older content. Shift the algorithm to prioritize regular uploads and penalize channels where the most watched video is from ten years ago. That will encourage creators to “refresh” their content or outright delist older videos and EVERYONE will blame the youtubers rather than question why. Then, once analytics show that the vast majority of videos that are watched are from the past year or two? “To ensure high availability of 16k videos, we are partially archiving all older videos. If you want to watch Michael Reeves ride his motorcycle through a dust storm, you need to go to the page, click this button, and then wait 30 seconds for it to transfer from archive to the good servers. Sorry for the disruption but… go fuck yourself”.
At which point, bandwidth drops drastically. So does storage. And… it still is not a profitable enterprise but it is a much lower cost to google to maintain.
I think they meant YouTube would die in a year or less if it was seperated from google. But I am not quite sure.
I know it’s probably just me, but YouTube could disappear tomorrow and it would probably take me weeks to notice.
If there’s one thing I actively avoid for it’s abysmal information density, it’s videos.